


Run my chicken fingers through your hair

by garyindistress



Category: EXO (Band)
Genre: Canon, M/M, post-disbandment
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-12-30
Updated: 2013-12-30
Packaged: 2018-01-06 16:52:38
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 13,358
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1109240
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/garyindistress/pseuds/garyindistress
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Lu Han returns from a long sabbatical and hits up speed-dial #1. Post-disbandment fic.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Run my chicken fingers through your hair

**Author's Note:**

> For one-if-by-land @LJ, exoforsichuan.
> 
> I tried my best to do them justice ;_; but y'know, art can't imitate perfection

It’s been raining for a week straight. Next month marks his five-year anniversary with this city but everyone who knows Yixing knows they’re brute-forcing this marriage. Beijing’s the overbearing wife who shaves a few years off your lifespan with her strategically pitched whine and Yixing can never get enough of playing the doting husband, the one who whips out his pocketbook and says, “Whatever you want.” He’s sick in love with this terrible place, its moods and people, ubiquitous dirt. And he needs it. The feeling is not mutual. It’s got thousands of him, like little desperate parasites.

Luckily the host happens to be kind of poisonous herself.

The tea kettle releases a shrill, insistent whistle. Outside a cat has been mewing for the past hour. Yixing lives on the first floor and if he cranes his neck against the window he could probably see it. Poor thing’s probably drenched, he thinks, turning off the flame, but not before the inside of his wrist brushes against the hot steel and burns an instant painful pink. He’s always doing stupid shit like this. Verging on thirty and it’s like he’s never lived alone before.

He runs his hand under the faucet. Meow, goes the cat. Someday he’ll want one, a whole litter of them, soft-footed as they weave through the rooms of his spacious dream house. Keeping his daughter’s feet warm as she reads by the imitation fireplace.

It’s only eight o’clock. What if it has rabies? He could clean it up and send it back out on a drier day. He wonders if it’s a boy or a girl. On the news the anchorwoman’s launched into their new segment, highlighting random acts of kindness every Friday. Today a twenty-something-year-old guy found an elderly woman collapsed in the street and rushed her to the hospital despite already running late for his job interview. The camera zooms in on a balding white man assuring the folks watching that they’ll definitely be giving him a callback.

Someone’s at the door.

Yixing gets up from the couch. He hovers over the doorknob, wondering why he never had that peephole installed. “Who is it?”

The “meow” that answers him sounds at first ridiculously contrived and human, and then: summoned as if from a blocked memory.

“Uh, hey.”

Yixing has to look down to find Lu Han, crouched on the balls of his feet, petting a miserable black cat with the back of one hand, fingers curled into a loose fist on the other, about to knock again.

“Sorry I didn’t call first. My phone ran out of battery halfway through the plane ride, and then I didn’t have change for the payphones,” Lu Han says, wiping his wet hand on his wet jeans. His hair’s the shade of a breakfast hash brown and dripping rivulets into his eyes. Everything about him shouts cold and hungry and he carries the smell of a foreign country, like it got so attached it followed him home.

“And my luggage got lost during the layover at Kuala Lumpur. I gave them your address, is that okay?”

He’s leaking onto the placemat Yixing’s mother picked out for him, the one with the ugly chrysanthemums, now tracked with mud from Lu Han’s boots.

“Uh,” Yixing says again. It’s true, sometimes you can forget how to talk to someone if you go long enough without talking to them. Physical talking. They’ve emailed a few times. He retweets some of Lu Han’s weibos from time to time out of boredom and obligation. The boredom’s rarer. He’s got the other one in spades. “You wanna come in first?”

In that immediate post-disbandment period, the first ten months of emotional displacement, realizing they were without a job—it was the symbolism of the matter, not that they were actually financially wanting—EXO gained an average of five kilos per member. Kyungsoo, who announced he’d never skip another bowl of rice in his life, was bestowed upon with the promising beginnings of a potbelly. Most of them had offers, someplace else to go. Joonmyun and Jongdae had musicals lined up in the fall, Minseok was enlisting, Chanyeol had finally grown into his limbs and saucer eyes and was self-grooming to be the next Lee Seunggi in variety, minus the singing chops and plus a sort-of sordid past. It was okay; redemption was in that year. G-dragon had just gotten caught rolling E at an underground house party during New York fashion week and the media in an uncharacteristic move painted it in a pretty Western light, as a desperate call for help, stars led astray by the pressures of early fame. “So then he was like, ‘Let’s go with that,’ and we did,” Zitao mimicked in his best G-dragon drawl, which was not that great. By the time they disbanded Zitao had made the full transformation from EXO caterpillar to Big Bang butterfly, helping out with their tours, throwing around casual royal “we”s, blowing GD on the side (unconfirmed).

Lu Han tried the solo thing for two years and then the summer of 2018 cultivated a gentle beard and stopped responding to their group email chain. A long-time fan spotted him trekking up Mount Hua in Xi An with a hiking staff. She could only make out a few features between the aviators and the new cat on his face, but “he looked warm!! ^^” “Let me know when you get out of your yeti phase,” Yixing had thought of writing him but instead wrote, “Hope you’re D.Oing O.K~” He left out the second period on purpose. This was what their friendship had come to. In his defense, Yixing had been a wreck scrambling to put out his second album. The desks at the studio were littered with half-eaten bowls of ramen and other putrifying takeout. The kimchi-flavored ones looked the grossest, crimson specks congealed and floating to the top. On more than one all-nighter Yixing had contemplated snapping a photo and sending it to Lu Han with the caption, “Red ocean…” but Lu Han and Jaejoong were actually friends now, he remembered, putting his phone away. Yixing also remembered being impressed, since one-sided creepy worship didn’t normally segue into a healthy working relationship. That was like Sehun dating one of his former noona fans. Jongin ragged on him for months, but they were all secretly jealous. Some weeks Sehun was gone for nights at a time, Baekhyun told Yixing, with an obnoxious post-it stuck to his door that read, “at my boo’s.” They took turns drawing hairy penises over it. By the time he got back the tiny square had multiplied into twenty and together they made an uncanny mosaic portrait of Sehun. Sehun squinted and pointed. “Are those dicks in my eye?” Jongin was especially proud of that one. “Next time we’ll do an infinity art piece. Eyes on the dick in your eye which is made up of more dicks with eyes.” There were moments Jongin-and-Sehun felt all too familiar, all too unbearably close except younger and thereby less complicated, less opaque. 

The next year Yixing collabed with Han Geng and “zhang yixing han geng matching bald spots” shot up to #12 on Sina’s Most Popular Searches of 2019. Both parties’ publicists called foul play, blaming stage lighting. His most loyal Xing Mis took the defensive stance that the small white patch was actually a halo because Zhang Yixing was a certified _angel_. Hair products began arriving in the mail. No endorsements, advised his manager, that’s tantamount to admitting you _are_ balding. On his birthday Lu Han shot him a quick international text: have you heard of this website? www.locksoflove.com. In reply Yixing instagrammed his middle finger and hashtagged it #dickhan. Two seconds later he deleted the photo and replaced it with a stuffed bunny Zhou Mi had sent him a week ago. Zhou Mi was always underestimating the speed of ground shipping.

“I CAN SUE,” came Lu Han’s second text. 

Yixing’s thumbs couldn’t move fast enough. “What, do you think this is America?” He had to bite back the laugh bubbling up his throat against the clench of his fist. 

Lu Han didn’t respond after that. In a week his weibo was overflowing with pictures of Sydney, Australia, the creepy-faced entrance to Luna Park, his sand-soiled feet against a backdrop of algae-green water and a devastating cobalt sky. The rare selca revealed a pale pink blistered nose, baby stubble dotting the skin above his upper lip. Like shoulder pads and legwarmers and boybands, the beard had been just a fad. “A real man is a real man with or without facial hair,” he’d written on one particularly well-shaven morning, and Yixing was pretty sure he’d replied with, “A real man should come home every now and then.”

A year later, here he is, surveying the inside of Yixing’s modest bedroom. He chokes at the sight of the posters, grabbing onto Yixing’s arm for support as his chin retreats helplessly into his neck. “Seriously. Still?”

“JYP will always be one of my role models.” 

“Your mancrush is surprisingly enduring,” Lu Han says with effort, uncurling his fingers and dropping his hand. 

“What? I like the way he sings. We’ve talked about this before.”

“Ages ago. I didn’t think your boner would last into the next millennium.” Lu Han’s tapping on the dresser, jiggling his leg. He points at the bed. “Can I sit?”

“Go ahead,” Yixing says, distractedly. “Hey, JYP is a fine performer—“

“‘—and I like the timbre of his voice—‘“

“—and I like— _hey_.”

“Sorry.” It’s costing Lu Han a world of restraint to not grin. He pushes down on the mattress with his ass. “Bad habit. Go on.”

Yixing sits down next to him, feeling the bed dip below their combined weight. It’s easier when he doesn’t have to make eye contact. “I think every now and then I could use a reminder you don’t need to be a vocal powerhouse to be a decent singer, you know?”

“I think you’re a vocal powerhouse. Like a tiny, nasally one.”

“Ha ha,” says Yixing, landing a punch just below Lu Han’s bicep. Unexpectedly, he hits more muscle than bone. It kind of hurts. “You’re the true vocal powerhouse.”

“Nah.” Yixing feels Lu Han twist to look at him. “Let’s be real, if we’re splitting hairs here, neither of us really qualifies.”

On more than one occasion Yixing has had one of Lu Han’s singles come up on shuffle and paused whatever he was doing to listen. Hovered his fingers over the keyboard and forgotten the next word he was going to type. That kind of listen. 

“There’s something to be said for the way you… move people.”

“I was a one-hit wonder.”

But still a wonder. The biggest wonder of all is probably that Lu Han believes the sort of self-flagellating shit that comes out of his mouth. “Yeah,” Yixing says, trying not to sound frustrated. “By choice.”

Lu Han scratches the back of his head, where his perm is drying in cauliflower clumps. He looks thoughtful, almost shy. But it clicks away the next second like a well-used light switch. His mouth curves up in a clownish half-grin. 

“Well, you know what. You move me, too.” 

A hand lands on Yixing’s thigh. Another around the nape of his neck.

For a moment Yixing is speechless. Then Lu Han closes his eyes and begins to lean in, still with that same perverted grin. He has a pimple on his cheek and the number of wrinkles mapping out from the corners of his eyes has doubled in the time he was away. _Sunscreen_ is Yixing’s first incoherent thought, except it isn’t really. His first thought is a feeling, an unconscious awareness that his heart might have stopped, and soon after arrives the sinking reminder, a thudding _wait; no; this isn’t it_ , a stone dropped into a dark and endless well. 

It’s enough for his motor reflexes to kick in. His hand grabs on to the nearest pillow and launches it gracefully into Lu Han’s stupid face. 

 

*

 

In the morning he finds Lu Han at the kitchen table, scrolling on his phone and drinking coffee from Yixing’s favorite mug. His head tilts up at the sound of Yixing’s slippers shuffling into the room. “G’morning, dear.”

“Dear?” Yixing rubs gooey sleep out of his eyes. For a second he couldn’t even place this stranger in his kitchen. “You sound like Kris.”

The last consonant trails off in a stream of guilt; he forgot in his half-zombie state that this was taboo, talking about Kris. No one talks openly about Kris, or has in years, except when they’re asked in interviews. Joonmyun’s staunch answer had always been, we’re a twelve-man band. Just like Super Junior was always going to be an unwavering thirteen. It was the initial mold that mattered the most, not the later fallaway casualties. In a way Kyuhyun got lucky.

Lu Han doesn’t seem to notice. “How’s he doing?” he asks into the mug.

Yixing slides onto a stool and gently tries to goad the cup out of Lu Han’s hand. “I need it more than you do,” he says when Lu Han’s grip tightens.

“I’m jetlagged.”

“Sydney’s two hours ahead. C’mon, hand it over.” Yixing makes a quick grab for the mug, and Lu Han lets out a shrill yelp, covers it with his other hand and slides it horizontally across the table, stopping just short against the wall.

Yixing tries not to laugh. It’s just so silly. “I swear, if you play finger football with my favorite—“

“I’m exhausted on the inside,” Lu Han says with a straight face. “I probably won’t remember this conversation tomorrow.”

“There won’t be a tomorrow for you at this rate,” Yixing says. “Fine, take your dumb coffee. I’ll make my own.”

Lu Han hovers over him while he refills the tea kettle. His gleeful voice sends a puff of hot breath down Yixing’s back. “Your dumb coffee, you mean. But what were you saying about Kris?”

He wasn’t saying anything. The sound of water filling the pot overrides some of the tension in the room, imagined or not. “He’s okay, I think.”

He thinks maybe that’s that but Lu Han plants an elbow on the kitchen counter, spinning his torso to give Yixing his full exaggerated attention. Only he could pull off mock irreverence like that, playful and innocent, entirely free of bitterness. “Yeah? When’s the last time you talked to him?”

Yixing closes the lid on the kettle and turns on the flame. With his wet hand he flicks water in Lu Han’s face. “New Year’s? I don’t know.”

“You don’t know or you don’t wanna say? Hey, it’s alright. We’re all over it now.”

But they weren’t. Yixing knew for a fact they weren’t. At the last EXO reunion he’d overheard Joonmyun speaking to Jongin in a hushed whisper, “When height is your most marketable attribute—“ He broke off when he saw Yixing, slipping into his practiced Suho smile instead. They discussed safer topics like Baekhyun’s upcoming wedding, and whether it was normal to get arthritic knees in the winter, “or those toe warts, you know, on the flat underside of your—“ Chanyeol chimed in, which was when Kyungsoo put down his plate of foie gras. It was fun, really, and normal, and they reminisced over the missing members—Minseok, on the last two months of his army stint; Jongdae, touring through South Asia; and Lu Han, god knows where—and pretended they hadn’t seen Kris’ face plastered all over every entertainment news outlet, acting opposite Kim Minjung in a new drama about a cross-cultural period romance. Historians were going to be weeping tears of blood over this one, but Kris was slowly winning back Korean fans, one skincare commercial at a time. “So bubbly,” he enthused in a neutral voice, piercing you with his ice cold glare before dragging one mammoth hand down his foaming face. 

Kris was okay. Is okay. Last Yixing heard, he was banging a half-Russian model who just turned twenty and considered himself in love. Maybe. Then he had to hang up because they were going to glue on his wig and that included painting over his ear. “Miss you, man!” The last part hissed with crumply static; it sounded like he was yelling from the other end of a tunnel. Probably someone had wrestled the cellphone away.

Yixing doesn’t say any of that. He glances down at Lu Han with guarded interest. If they can’t talk about it now, they’ll never talk about it. “Are you? Over it, I mean.”

Lu Han regards him carefully, and lets out a small smile, just as wary. “Sure. My grudge lasted maybe ten seconds max. And honestly? It’s one of the stupidest things I’ve ever been mad about.”

Yixing tries not to smile back. “Ah, so you were mad.”

In the days preceding Kris’ decision to leave, the M dorm was imbued with a sick, putrid tension. Finally Lu Han confronted him, and the first thing he said was, “Look, I’m not mad, but—“ which was a terrible, transparent lie, because you knew just from hearing the quiver in his voice. His mouth was a thin uncertain line. Yixing was listening to music in his room. He turned it up, then he turned it down. The thing was, Kris had gone to Yixing first, and Zitao second. Asked if they’d support him in this—asked if they’d go, too. Yixing had happened first, months before the actual paper-signing, and Kris made him swear he wouldn’t tell anyone, not even Lu Han. With Zitao they’d gone into his room and closed the door behind them. A moment later, something hard hit the wall. The whole dorm shook. Minseok stirred from his afternoon nap, lifted his head, went back to sleep. When they came out Zitao was staring at his feet, his hands hidden in his jean pockets, and Kris was blinking a lot. Jongdae unplugged an earbud and looked back and forth between them but no one answered when he asked what the hell was wrong with them two, could someone tell him what was up?

“If you want to know why I didn’t ask you,” Yixing heard Kris begin to say. It sounded like he’d reached the end of his patience, this was a fight they’d been having for days without either of them speaking up—the Krishan Cold War.

“That’s not what I said,” Lu Han said quietly. 

“—I don’t think you’re ambitious enough,” Kris finished. And there it was, out in the open now. Too late to retract. Yixing wished he hadn’t heard anything, but there probably wasn’t a single person in the dorm who hadn’t heard it.

“Okay,” said Lu Han. “I wish you the best in your future endeavors.”

According to Zitao, he’d stuck out his hand, which Kris stared at in bewilderment. Was he fucking kidding him? No, he wasn’t. Basically, Lu Han was saying, I’ve written you out of my life. Thanks for all the good times.

“I know now he was just being smart. It’s not selfish to look out for yourself. This life is too short for regrets.” Lu Han slips back onto a stool and folds his arms behind his head. “I don’t know why I took it so personally.”

Yixing doesn’t say, “I know why,” even though he does. It’s the same way he felt for the two years Lu Han spent traipsing around the globe, leaving only vague hints on Weibo as to his whereabouts. A corner of sky here, a patch of moss there. Dirtied up Keds, or his long tanned arm pointing into the distance. From the top of his luxury hotel that one time in Greece: a sprawl of clean white stucco houses and lilac domes, a reflection of his hand in the dusty window glass.

“You’re so wise now” is what Yixing says instead, as he gets up to brew his coffee.

 

*

 

On the way to the supermarket Lu Han is jubilant, stepping into the street unaware of the speeding bicyclist ready to run them over. “Hey, good day to you too, man!” Lu Han does a half-pirouette and calls after the guy, who flips them off without even turning his hoodie. Kids these days. Yixing’s laugh gets swallowed in a big gust of wind and they march on in pursuit of restocking Yixing’s empty fridge.

The giant Carrefour takes up a whole block. Lu Han has stopped dead still in front of him, staring up at the massive red and blue logo overhead. Framed against the silhouette of the superstore, he’s a small, scant figure, a Lego person. Yixing could see it in a photo. _Boy, eye of the storm, 20XX._ “Nothing like homecoming, right,” he teases, pushing Lu Han into a column of shopping carts.

“You didn’t have to come.” They trawl slowly through the produce aisle. He turns to find Lu Han’s head hidden behind a cantaloupe, raised against the light as if he were checking it for deformities.

“It’s so… symmetrical.” Lu Han lowers the melon, eyes lit up. “Can we take it home?”

It goes into the cart. So does a box of some French imported cereal Yixing has never heard of that he didn’t even know the place had stocked. What happened to good old-fashioned Made In China everything? Where was their pride in the motherland? “I don’t even know you,” he says while Lu Han scans the nutrition facts on a bottle of Zico coconut water. “Can you even read that?”

“Sure,” Lu Han says smugly. “‘Nutrition facts.’”

Yixing starts a slow clap. Lu Han continues:

“‘All natural. Great for everything. Hair loss. Dick enhancement.’”

“I’m average-sized in some countries,” Yixing yells, raising a cucumber.

Zico goes into the cart. 

“You really didn’t have to come,” Yixing says again while they’re waiting in line. Lu Han slouches beside him, sizing up everyone waiting in the other lines. He turns, wrinkling his forehead. “What was I gonna do, go through your DVD collection at home? I have your porn collection memorized by heart.”

Yixing freezes. Lu Han, capitalizing on the silence, begins ticking them off,

“‘Beauty and the Beast-man’, ‘Spongebob Strap-on’—”

Yixing almost breathes a sigh of relief. But the woman behind them with the little girl is starting to stare. “ _Hey_.”

Lu Han steals a glance at the concerned parent and lowers his voice. “And then the one where they all dress up as Sailor Scouts and you can’t see the guy the entire time, except when the tip of his dick comes onscreen just as he’s about to leak on Sailor Mars’ fa—“

“Yeah, okay, I get it. You have a great memory when it comes to every video I’ve ever had illegally downloaded onto my laptop once upon a time, by the combined powers of Kim Jongdae and Kris Wu.”

Lu Han puts his hands up. “No judgment here,” he says, but his look quickly turns sly. “Okay, on a serious note, I remember you were always super vanilla about it. Like some of the guys would be going at it but you’d, you’d never put your hand down your pants or anything. You had to wait until everyone was gone to jerk off, you sensitive prick.”

A moment later they’re piling everything onto the conveyer belt. Yixing reaches for his wallet but Lu Han bats his arm away. “You can get dinner tomorrow. And everything else. Including me.”

He means, _Including having to put up with me._

“Hey, slowpoke. Don’t think I’m gonna carry all this home by myself,” Lu Han starts, tapping on an invisible watch with his free hand. “Even though I could. You know. With my subtle but manly European muscles.”

“Those things? I thought they were animal balloons.”

Lu Han looks like he’s about to be offended but his eyes catch on a reflective surface by the cashier register. “Wait, is that Kris’ new rap single?”

 

*

 

In one of his untouched cabinets they find a rolling pin. Lu Han thrusts it under his chin and throws his hoodie up. "No diggity chicks my name is Kris ya dig my di—“ 

"Bling," Yixing corrects. "He said ‘bling.’ And the first line is 'kids' not 'chicks.'"

"Kris Wu, mom-panderer since 1990."

"He knows his demographic," Yixing says. "Moms and tweens."

Lu Han scrunches up his mouth, then releases, like relaxing a prune. They might’ve had a couple drinks after dinner. A bottle of wine lies prone on the table, just a splash left lining the sidewall. "What's yours? Let me guess… Starry-eyed late blooming virginal high schoolers about to embark on their next adventure in life. Whatever your latest album's called—‘Resurrected to Love’? with a glittery cross for the 't’—that can be the BGM to the scene where they walk up the steps to their university library and suddenly turn their heads and look— _GAZE_ —meaningfully upon the vast green courtyard behind them and all the symbolism, all the opportunity that awaits them in one full sweep—" Lu Han mimics the zipping motion of a dolly shot with his hands, a moving frame centered on Yixing's baffled face, "—a sweet, sad smile if it's a girl, a subtle... fist pump if it's a guy... maybe over the ending of that song you worked with Henry on. I think violins are a good way to go, real punchy and dramatic."

Cramped into a corner of the couch, Yixing realizes he is holding his breath. Lu Han's hands are still in the shape of a rectangle, centered on his face. "I was going to go with, coffeeshop frequenters, or ex-Edison Chen fans." In the back of his mind he's thinking, how many times have you listened to that album? It dropped while Lu Han was still in Europe. On Christmas, Yixing remembers, because they'd popped open a bottle of champagne in the record studio and he'd reflected, at the time, over his third glass that this was quite possibly the loneliest he'd ever been on a Christmas Eve, and that was saying a lot.

"Hey," Lu Han says, defensively. "Everyone deserves a second chance. It's not like Edison wanted the whole world to know he made it with three-quarters of the HK entertainment industry. Maybe he took those photos for himself, you know, you get what I'm saying. And what do you mean, 'ex-'? Have you _heard_ his latest single? Wait." 

Lu Han holds up a hand, his eyes widening behind five fingers. "Hang on. Are you saying you wrote some of those songs for me?"

Panic is quick, like a needle to a dilated vein. Yixing gets a stroke of it injected into his spine, shooting straight up to the back of his neck, distilling the mild alcoholic stupor. "All my songs are for you," he says the next moment. His voice doesn’t even sound like his. "Lost souls like you. Kids who don't know how to find their way home."

But Lu Han is undeterred. His grin carries a thousand and one lewd suggestions. "I see. So I'm your muse. I _inspire_ you."

Yixing rolls his eyes; at least that doesn’t take effort. "Yeah, okay, let's not get ahead of ourselves here."

Lu Han leans his greasy face in closer. "Wanna take a photo of me and set it as your cell phone background?" 

"You're disgusting," Yixing says, shaking his head.

"I love when you talk down to me," says Lu Han, scrunching up one eye into a wink and blowing him a kiss.

 

*

 

As trainees they had taken a class on it, and while many things might not have come naturally to Yixing he had no problem gazing into the handheld mirror and carefully smiling one eye shut while keeping the other as friendly and focused as possible. Two rows ahead Lu Han kept swiveling in his seat, appealing to his neighbors for help. “It doesn’t look right when I do it,” Yixing heard Lu Han complain to Baekhyun, who agreed that no, it really didn’t. Lu Han’s wink was either an involuntary tic or an evil-eye. “Maybe you should just smile normally. Yeah, like that.” Baekhyun’s suggestion was hardly comforting because having a pleasant smile was the most standard baselines for aspiring idols. Many things could be manufactured but a nice smile was harder to fake, particularly one that invited you in and beckoned, _it’s okay to look at me, like me, fall in love with me_. A good smile was like an outstretched hand, with gently calloused fingers, the kind of hand that touched big money and remained clean.

Before Lu Han arrived rumors traveled of a fair, pale Chinese boy joining the company, with a face that bore the echoes of past sunbaenim, someone destined for acceptance. Yixing doesn’t remember the day he was first introduced, but details are for later invention. He does remember Lu Han’s stringy frame and the mullet perm, the astonishing bright eyes before his first unaccented “Hi.” Later, Lu Han joined his dance class and proved to be, if not a natural, then pretty able. He wasn’t awkward or floppy, and where he lacked in power and control he made up for with borderline athletic instinct. He knew his body, just not the angles. “Focus,” Yixing would order quietly, just loud enough for Lu Han to catch under the booming music. Because Lu Han was an easy subject, it took only one word for muscle memory to kick in, and he’d invariably snap into place.

All the sleep deprivation in the world couldn’t distract them from one thing. Most of them were teenagers, give or take, priming for a stage that would never wholly belong to them. While other kids their age were already drafting up amateur resumes, Yixing’s only bulletpoints were “D-list child celebrity” and “exceptionally hard worker,” neither of which translated into immediate marketability. The facial enhancements helped, though. The new nose brought out a confidence in him he hadn’t even known he’d been lacking. But Lu Han, for all his untarnished Korean and sunlit doe eyes, was twenty. In the modern day few twenty-year-olds got to this age without a backup plan.

So they figured he must’ve been rich. “Little Chinese prince,” they teased him, without malice because Lu Han was easygoing and likable and _understandable_. When he spoke Koreans thought he was one of them. In the same way that his soft Mandarin brought tears to the eyes of some. “You’re going to make it,” the Chinese kids told him on their darkest, most abject days. “If it’s going to be any of us, it’ll be you,” their voices twinging with hopelessness, pride, envy.

At nineteen Yixing was coming to terms with a lot of things, like the critique he’d received as a hopeful child performer. He Jiong had once knelt down and taken Yixing’s hands in his and said, “Listen, kiddo. You’ll probably never be the best at anything, but please don’t stop wanting to.” The whole time Yixing thought, didn’t his knees hurt? But He Jiong was right. Yixing couldn’t always reach the low notes, but he could croon out those accessible to him in perfect pitch. His wire-thin voice would never be his number one asset. And he probably wasn’t going to grow any taller, either. This was it. This was Zhang Yixing, for better or worse. The kind of boy who could break up with the girl he loved for an impossible dream. 

Lu Han never gave him time to become jealous. After dance class he’d run after Yixing with an extra bottle of water, hugging a towel around his neck. Sometimes he tied it in the front, and it made him look like he was wearing a bib. He slipped into Chinese when it was just them and Kris, and together they complained about everything from the casual bullying to the quality of snacks stocked up in the vending machine outside the cafeteria. “Branch out,” Kris said from above on one rare free afternoon, the only visible part of him being his leg, hanging off the top bunk. “Try one of the fruity nut snacks.” He was starting to grow hair everywhere. Yixing watched with fascination and found that Lu Han, lying beside him and breathing softly, watched, too.

Winter came. In self-preservation they discovered alcohol. Yixing, who abstained from most vices, enjoyed pouring a tall glass of beer and allowing himself to be warmed from the inside out. He was a secret hearth, burning where no one could see. Beside him in the cramped food stall Lu Han pounded his frosty glass and confessed, unprompted, unseemly secrets. It wasn’t Zitao who peed in the pool that one time. After a nasty fight with his parents he’d once prayed, dear god, let me be Korean. He tried shaving his pubes for fun and went commando for a week. He’d never been in a relationship. 

“I mean, I’ve liked someone before. Really, really liked her. But it didn’t work out.”

The word for it in Chinese was _an lian_. Love in the dark. Because a one-sided love wasn’t open or happy. It was brooding and hard, and you wished it away while simultaneously willing it to stay, for the other person to not just look at you but in the way that you wanted them to. Yixing stared at the veiny cracks in the wooden table while Lu Han spoke, a small headache blossoming beneath his temples. He felt hungover, but also sympathy, and an urgent need for Lu Han to know that he understood. Wordlessly he slung an arm around Lu Han’s neck, tender and hot against the softest part of his skin.

“It’s embarrassing, saying this, but I’m actually pretty devoted when I like someone. Like, I _commit_.” The only time Lu Han ever complimented himself was when he was drunk. His eyes rolled lazily upwards until he frowned and blinked them back into focus. “None of that half-assed horseshit.”

“Yeah, I’m sure.” With an unsteady hand Yixing filled up both their glasses. “No point otherwise.”

“No point otherwise,” Lu Han agreed. He lifted the glass and paused, for a split second, to look at Yixing. With no escape route, Yixing looked back. Lu Han’s eyes were cloudy from the drinking, red-rimmed from the not sleeping, and in them Yixing detected some apprehension, a glowing repressed fear of _something_. Up close he was extremely boyish, in a way that always surprised people, as if they expected only eyelashes and smooth skin and the thundering of their own pulse. The reality was razor bumps, his bottom lip chapping viciously from the unhumidified air of their dorm room, and a boy who wasn’t drunk enough to not look away. Averting his eyes, Lu Han pressed his lips to the glass, large enough to cover his face and thereby distort it.

 

*

 

It takes a week for Yixing to bring up the topic.

“Are you looking for a place to stay?”

Lu Han perks up, showing a string of perfectly lined upper teeth. “Are you offering?”

“No.” The force of Yixing’s conviction surprises even himself. Lu Han looks almost hurt. “I mean, you’re welcome to stay for however long you need to…” get your shit together. “…figure things out. But I don’t think this would work as a permanent, you know. Arrangement.”

“Aw.” Lu Han makes a sad face. “Why not, boo?”

“Because? When’s the last time you’ve lived with someone?”

Lu Han rolls his eyes up to the ceiling in consideration. “Do hostels count?”

“…”

“Oh, oh. In Rome I had a one-night-stand with this woman I met at the hotel bar who then put me up in her nice villa for a week. Well, she was gone during the day, but that kinda counts as cohabiting with someone, no? It was fun playing with her dogs.”

“I can’t tell if you’re on your side or my side but it sounds a lot like you’re on my side.”

“I’m saying,” and Lu Han sidles up to Yixing, loops his arm in Yixing’s, “I’d make a great roommate. Do you want a dog?”

“It’s not a good idea,” Yixing says, squirming away. It’s too warm in here, but Lu Han won’t let go.

“Why not?” Lu Han asks more seriously, still not letting go. “The dog or us? If us—we did it once before. For years. I hope you remember.”

“Which is why I know how annoying you are,” Yixing says. “Trust me. The list of grievances I drafted up from that era of our lives runs as long as the Yangtze.”

He waits for Lu Han to laugh, but Lu Han doesn’t laugh. Instead he releases Yixing’s arm and tucks his knees to his chest. “Really? Hit me.”

“What?”

“What were some of your, what was it—grievances? Let’s hear them.”

Lu Han props his elbows up on his knees and sets Yixing with an intent look. He doesn’t seem upset but genuinely curious. Yixing is regretting the bluff. “Well,” he stutters, already off to a rocky start. He’s as shitty a liar as shitty liars go. “You… smell.”

Lu Han smelled normal for someone who showered once a day, if that. In reality Yixing was the one with a problem. Once they found him in the shower, slumped against the faucethead, water dripping into his nostrils and his slightly parted lips. He was snoring. Lu Han’s “Jesus fucking Christ” woke him up. The first thing he saw were those large concerned eyes. Kris threw him a towel and said, “Clean yourself up, man,” as if he were disgusted. “He’s too clean,” Lu Han said, shaking his head. “He needs to be a little dirtier.”

 _Let’s get you into bed_ , Lu Han said after Kris left, manhandling Yixing into his unmade sheets. Yixing felt unusually exposed in just a pair of patterned boxers, standing in front of what was probably his closest bandmate and friend at the moment in terms of both emotional and physical distance. Standing so close he could smell the faint boy smell on Lu Han, nothing that could be described vividly or even warranted describing, but still very distinctly Lu Han. Something he could close his eyes to and say, yeah I know who this is.

Lu Han was pushing him into bed, pulling the comforter over his bare chest. Then, after a beat, he pressed his lips against Yixing’s forehead. _Sweet dreams, you little brat._

“I’m just kidding,” Yixing says at the look of horror on Lu Han’s face. “You’re free to stay until, you know, whenever. However long you need.”

 

*

 

The ease with which Lu Han settles into the apartment is reminiscent of a lot of things that don’t seem like they’d go together but mysteriously do. Soy milk and fried breadsticks. Electronic music and hip-hop. The words “apricot juice” in Lu Han’s slanty hand under Yixing’s smaller and more precise characters making up the grocery list now stuck to the fridge under a magnet shaped like the Eiffel Tower, a long-forgotten souvenir from Sehun. 

“You still have this, huh,” Lu Han had mused when he first noticed, and he grazed his thumb over the magnet with the kind of vapid expression that was often painted onto dolls.

Sehun’s Europe adventure had been his last pre-enlistment hurrah, right after Lu Han abandoned his solo career and took refuge in the city of love, suddenly not only solo but desolate. The first month there’d been WeChats and nightly QQ conversations, with “I’m bored” translating to the harder-to-admit “I’m lonely.” “Take care of yourself,” Yixing wrote back, because some things weren’t easy for him to admit, either. Then the messages grew infrequent, coming once a week, and eventually petered out altogether. That was when Sehun announced to their active email list, “I’m gonna visit Lu Han-hyung in Paris.”

Sehun’s short-lived crush on Lu Han in the year leading up to their debut had been as obvious to anyone as a gochujang stain on a freshly laundered white shirt. But like a lot of schoolboy-on-boy crushes, this teetered on the edge of idol worship, glorifying Lu Han into the big brother Sehun never had and secretly hoped he himself might become. It was hard, getting to know yourself on just four hours of sleep a day. That kind of deprivation brought people together, especially when the people were young and as malleable as fresh mounds of clay. Sehun didn’t think of himself as clay but a tall, good-looking boy with a lot of potential but not enough personality to pull it off. Lu Han, though, was all personality, with his charming joker grin which said nothing but Sehun found comforting in a way that he didn’t have the capacity to make sense of. He really liked who Lu Han was, and on a bad day he might’ve even loved him. Later, after a year’s worth of flashing lights and constantly being hounded about their friendship, he loved him differently, as he grew more comfortably into himself. When he became mature enough for introspection, he would wonder if it was just the idea of Lu Han that he thought he loved in the first place. 

After the trip Sehun didn’t say much. “We went to all the famous sites, you know… Eiffel Tower, the Louvre, that famous church. It was a lot of fun.” Yixing might’ve been spacey about many things, but he noticed the way Sehun overcompensated with emoticons where they were asking for concrete details. Everyone wanted to know how Lu Han was. What was he up to these days? How did he look? “Like himself. Like he always does. Lu Han-hyung. His hair is black again.” When he received this email Yixing closed his eyes and tried to visualize what “Lu Han-hyung” was supposed to look like. Crazy eyes and a disembodied grin came to mind. 

A few weeks later Sehun found himself a serious relationship, a city girl who’d never set foot outside of Seoul. Yixing saw a few selcas of them, pouting into the cameraphone with their cheeks pressed together. One year later they were engaged; the girl, Kyungmi, was three months pregnant. 

“I can’t believe he’s a dad,” Lu Han says now, an undeniable note of pride and fondness in his voice. “But think about it… Isn’t it weird to commit yourself to one person for the rest of your life?”

Yixing stills his knife-wielding hand over the uncut carrots. It feels like he’s cooked more this past week than he has the entire year. “It’s not that weird, when you think about what goes into creating a family. Two people’s stable, and you need stable if you’re gonna raise a kid. Maybe more.”

“Thanks for the lesson. ‘Maybe more’? Are you planning on making an illegitimate baby in the countryside?”

“I’m just saying.” For some reason his face is hot.

“You want a dozen little yous running around? _Baba, I want ice cream. Baba, I’m tired can you pick me up I don’t wanna walk anymore_.” Lu Han’s switched to a higher register. His falsetto sounds like a dying animal.

It is inexplicably easy for Yixing to slip into the role of the long-suffering father.

“Baba’s tired too, son.”

“Hey, I’m a girl.” 

“Oh yeah?” 

When Yixing lifts his head, Lu Han is laughing. His bottom teeth are the smallest kernels of candy corn, something SM never bothered fixing. It’s nice, in a way. Yixing gets up in the morning and sometimes doesn’t know what he sees in the mirror. That part never really goes away.

“I’m the prettiest girl in my class,” Lu Han continues. He grabs a tuft of hair growing out of the back of his head and attempts to twirl it around his finger. 

“I know you are. You’re mine,” Yixing manages to say without puking.

Lu Han barks out a short delighted laugh and stops twirling. “Yeah, _you_ ’d be a great dad. Sunday spankings for all. Then take them out for popsicles afterwards. Carrot _and_ the stick. I’d be buried in parenting books still clueless and you’d just know, you sly bastard.” He pauses for a thoughtful glance. “You seeing anyone right now?”

“I’m flattered, but you forgot I can’t prioritize.”

“Really? I always thought you did it pretty well. Better than a lot of other people anyway.”

 

*

 

There was a time when leaving had been on his mind like a trickle of TV white noise for weeks. He was tired, the dangerous kind, edgy like Kyungsoo at his worst. EXO hadn't been around for long—a year, or a little over. In interviews he was constantly zoning out. They’d dyed his hair roughly the same color as the rest of him. His eyes were miniature ships, thrumming dully as the only signs of life in an otherwise vast blond sea. Sometimes Lu Han sat in the front, right before him, and sometimes he was there to his left. When they stood next to each other Lu Han would place a hand on the small of his back as a reminder. Second year is always the hardest, he'd heard; the dreaded sophomore slump. They didn't have the initial excitement to ride off anymore, here began the grueling journey of tolerance and compromise. "And every year you suffer a greater chance of irrelevance." Henry pointed at himself good-naturedly, even though “Trap” had just come out to moderate fanfare. Kris punched him in the shoulder but didn't disagree. Fans were suspicious, too, some asking when he was coming home for good. The truth was, he knew he wasn't ready. There was still a lot to work on. He couldn't depend on Xing Mis to support him the entire way. He was still paving the brick road, trying to build himself into something more solid.

His mindset was standard, predictable: work first, love later. He Jiong disagreed. "You're young. Don't be so _serious_." Which was about as helpful as "Just have fun" or "Live it up while you can." Lu Han said something this one time like, "Your gratification is so delayed it's probably lost by now." Zitao laughed even though he probably didn't know what they were talking about. At that point they'd stopped explaining things to him. There was only so much time in the world. It was no wonder, then, that he drifted and found willing ears elsewhere.

Going on stage alone was the single most terrifying thing he'd done in his life, even if he lived for that kind of terror. At the time he remembered thinking, how did I ever do this growing up? Watching old videos of himself was like observing a creepily animated floppy-limbed doppelganger. He still had some of the skits memorized but the script sounded like a foreign alphabet coming out of his doppelganger’s mouth in its pitchy girlish voice. "Just like riding a bicycle," said one of the PDs, patting him on the back, and maybe that was true. But he wasn't a kid anymore, didn’t have that dumb kid courage to fall back on. He couldn’t even remember being that kid. What he remembered was stuff like hurling himself onto Sehun koala-style after their first win. Joonmyun’s heartbreakingly embarrassing dry heaves punctuating the din of the crowd. When he closed his eyes, he saw Lu Han’s tragic updo, the way they blew his bangs out like crimson sun rays. Being alone was exhilarating, yeah, but those other five or eleven bodies hadn’t just been there to fill the space. They were anchors, reminding him every step he made was mirrored elsewhere in the formation; that every movement triggered another, each slight but equally significant as the last. Maybe it was brainwash, but that was the sort of believing that molded you into a person. Going solo was the equivalent of creating your own mythology. SM had that ability to make you feel special, almost god-like, even if Yixing had never had any delusions about his mortality. The lucky ones started from scratch; the less lucky ones had to tackle some past demons to get that clean slate. Yixing felt luckier than lucky to be intact at the beginning. He had his family and his Xing Mis, and a language he dreamed in. He’d use it to make something new.

 

*

 

Monday’s a good day for going into the studio. Lu Han jokes that if he squints he can sort of see the sun peeking out of the thick toupee of clouds. They weave through the dusty streets, Lu Han on a bike borrowed from the landlady’s son. “This hurts my crotch,” he complains, lifting himself off the seat at a red light. His legs pushing off the pedals, he looks like a puppet suspended in air by invisible microstrings. A couple strands of hair twist across his forehead in a sweaty arch. Yixing makes a quick swerve to his right and narrowly dodges a teenage girl crossing the street. She curses at him in a northern dialect, Tianjing or something. Lu Han shakes his head. Yixing steps off to apologize but the girl’s already gone. 

Sun Le swivels from side to side in his chair. “I’ve waited a century to meet you.”

Lu Han looks at Yixing. “What?” Yixing says.

Lu Han puts on a grin. “Sorry for the wait.”

“Lu Han. Is that your real name?”

“That’s what everyone asks.”

“And what do you tell them?”

“‘Three guesses.’”

“No, yes, no,” Sun Le ventures.

“Wrong. Correct answer is, I don’t know. I’m an orphan.” He can tell that joke with a straight face now.

The unspoken rules in the studio are straight-forward. Once Yixing puts on the headphones, he’s submerged. He uses his hands, nodding at suggestions he likes, frowning at the ones he doesn’t. Lu Han messes around with the switches on the unused keyboard but for the most part keeps to the laptop, complacent like a child with a toy. Yixing takes a water break at two and comes back to Lu Han squinting into his phone, one hand digging into his hair. He lifts his head at the sound of the door. “Break time?”

“Break over.” Yixing sinks into the chair next to him.

“I’ve never seen you work like this.”

“You were busy when I was busy.”

“I’m not busy now.”

“Are you ready to come back?” Yixing asks.

“Where do you think I am?”

“To entertainment,” Yixing says. “To singing.”

He knows he shouldn’t push. “I’m good for now,” Lu Han says, with a smile. 

Of course he’s thought about it, the two of them working in tandem. He has a folder on his laptop: _Duets_. It’s filled with unfinished guitar tabs, the last one dated four months ago. 

He doesn’t notice his arms are crossed until Lu Han’s prying them open, jamming their chairs together. “What’s up with the defensive stance?” Lu Han’s seat tips dangerously forward as he pulls Yixing’s arm away from him, toward himself, and karate chops his way up the length of the forearm. 

“This isn’t a massage,” Yixing mumbles, closing his eyes.

He feels Lu Han’s voice from a distance. “This is a lesson. Stop trying to hide from me.”

Which is kind of funny, all things considered.

The side of Lu Han’s hand coming down like a scythe slicing through his shoulder is less funny. “I’m serious. I’m not going to—“

The door swings open. Sun Le is carrying a stack of pizza boxes. “Lunch, anyone?”

 

*

 

In the bathroom Yixing checks his phone for the first time in what seems like days. Seven unread texts, two from his mother, the other five from concerned friends. Mostly one friend. And mostly concerned about whether Yixing’s going to ruin his weekend by bailing on another night out, yet again. _i know youre probly reading this in your grandpa bathrobe right now nursing a ho_

_t mug of tea to your frail &brittle chest but heres one last plea you coy motherfucker are you coming out _

_with us tonight or not BECAUSE IF NOT I SWEAR TO GOD I’LL CUT Y_

_sent that too fast ILL CUT YOU** ok call me back %_%_

_^_^*_

Jin’s actually a friend of Kris’, and immensely alive for someone who spent the last three years in rehab. He came to Beijing to teach English with the rest of the confused post-undergrad expat crowd and found solace in being chemically taken out of his own mind, at first on a monthly, then weekly, then almost-every-other-day-I-can’t-really-remember basis. It took him a good six months to sober up completely. “Non-addictive drug my ass,” he told Yixing when they first met. “That shit was the love of my life.” He lit up a cigarette and continued talking out of the corner of his mouth. “But you know, I was asking for it. Addictive personality and all. I can’t say no once I’ve said yes, and it’s always, god fucking yes. As a kid I sucked my thumb for fifteen years straight. Only weaned myself off that shit when I got into the habit of sucking dick instead. Oh. Shit. Kris told you I was—“

“Yeah,” Yixing had said, groggily, clinking Jin’s glass. “It’s cool. Bottoms up.”

Coming from an entertainment background Yixing had encountered the most repressed of them all. There were people who knew themselves, and people who didn’t. People who knew but also knew better than to show it, and people who didn’t give a fuck. Yixing hadn’t been close to Kim Heechul. Most people weren’t like Kim Heechul. Jin was the single most honest, secure person he’d ever met, out of both his celebrity and normal friends. He was “over it,” he liked to say, by which he meant “everything”—the self-deceit, the niceties of caring. 

“I’m genuinely concerned for you,” Jin said. “You look like you haven’t been touched since the dinosaur days.”

For Yixing it had literally been a decade. There were women, beautiful, capable, willing ones, but after Qiqi it was hard falling in love again. In terms of relationships he felt he’d peaked at age seventeen; he’d gotten everything he could’ve and given it up for something else. A question mark. A lofty goal. Now it was as if a dust-laden Do Not Disturb sign hung loosely over his heart, which was weird, because for most of his life he’d thought himself to be hopelessly transparent. But—“You’re about as opaque as that wall over there,” Lu Han had said before. He mimicked boring holes into the brick plaster. On Idol Weekly they would’ve added all the special effects, neon lasers shooting out of his big brown eyes. Sitting there between the two of them was, instead, nothing. After five seconds of silence Lu Han poked him in the side, grinning like none of what he’d just said was that life-altering. 

With Jin’s support Yixing began going on dates. Reluctantly at first, but it really was kind of a sport. The more he did it the easier it was to fish out the ones with potential. 

“Don’t say ‘potential,’” Jin groaned. “This isn’t a business venture.” But wasn’t it? Didn’t he want kids someday? Soon?

Maybe not soon.

“I’m not _eloquent_ like you,” Yixing said. “I just meant, I can see a future with her.”

“With or without squinting?”

It wasn’t like his dick had shriveled up. He still masturbated a few times a week, which he was certain was pretty standard for a guy in his late twenties. He still enjoyed a DVD every now and then. The problem came when he closed his eyes and unexpected memories floated to mind. The words Sehun had written, for instance, in an email after his trip to Paris. _A really handsome guy, like someone out of a movie_. He’d been describing Lu Han’s friend, the one who showed them around the entire week he’d been there. It came out of nowhere, the flashback, with the added bonus of an improvised nasal narration he heard in his head as clearly as Sehun’s adlibs in “Growl.” Weeks later Sehun had phoned him to talk about the wedding and had blurted out, “I found blond hair in his sink.”

“What are you talking about?”

“In Lu Han-hyung’s sink.” _His hair’s black now._

They were short bristles, dotting the shiny ceramic. Not just hair, but hair you shaved off your face.

“Were they roommates?” 

“No, he said his friend lived across the river.”

Later it felt almost like a dream, as if Sehun had never confessed to Yixing that he suspected Lu Han was dating a man. “Please pretend I never said anything. I just—I had to tell someone. I know I shouldn’t have. It’s stupid. They’re probably just friends.”

Sehun’s crush had been more than a crush, Yixing realized then, months later in the privacy of his bedroom. The force of the realization pulled his orgasm from him as if with an enormous invisible hand, and he collapsed backwards onto his pillow, still jerking himself frantically. He lay there for moments afterward, eyes shut, breathing heavily. His mind was blank, still as an unwavering sea. 

The next day he called the girl he’d been seeing and made love to her in the bathroom of the upscale lounge Jin had suggested. It had over a thousand reviews on Dianping and was the first and only place he’d ever engaged in public sex. What was supposed to be a one-night-stand made a swerve into full-blown relationship territory. When she invited him over he found that he didn’t want to say no. Yixing’s mother grew more excitable with each passing month, booking three-way Skype dates on both their Outlook calendars. She brought out a stack of baby pictures, and Yixing placed his hand over the laptop screen, filling up with the kind of embarrassment people mistake for happiness. One week ago he had celebrated his twenty-ninth birthday, and while no one was pressuring him to settle down, it wouldn’t have been a surprise to anyone. 

They had just witnessed the first snowfall of the season when he touched her hand and said, “I don’t think this is working.” The car cruised down the empty highway. She cried with her face turned away from him. On the radio they were playing “Wolf” in honor of Flashback Fridays. “Turn that shit off,” she spat at him. The fury of her tears was fogging up the window. “Fuck you, Zhang Yixing. As if I wasn’t good enough to you.”

The problem lay, as always, with him. He was broken inside. The once kneejerk-involuntary ability to devote himself to another human being now evaded him like an ancient Chinese riddle. Like the high school track star who never ran a mile post-graduation, Yixing was burned out. He started too early, fell too hard. It was possible, he thought, he would never love again. 

Yixing’s plight made Jin contemplative. “Maybe there’s someone in your life you’ve never been able to let go of. Someone from your past.” He stretched out like a cat on Yixing’s couch, his bare toes poking out from under the wool blanket. 

“Maybe what you need is closure,” continued Jin sleepily. He could’ve been talking about a sandwich. 

He was talking about Kris, Yixing discovered a few weeks later. “No way,” Yixing said, nearly spitting out his drink. “You’ve completely got it all wrong.”

“Are you sure?” Jin had one eyebrow skeptically arched. “He told me he once propositioned a bandmate, but the dude didn’t have the balls to go for it.”

“Kris and I have never—“

“It’s cool, man,” Jin said, a little embarrassed himself. “It could’ve been anybody else. There was like fifty of you in that boyband.”

The conversation reminded Yixing that no matter how well Jin seemed to understand him, he still fell into the category of ordinary people. Jin had grown up worrying about real life things. But some less real, less grave things could only be understood by people like yourself. Who, as conceited as it sounded, spent their formative years under the eye of a microscope, groomed themselves into the perfect receptacles for other people’s desires, fulfilling wishes like underage drug dealers. When EXO finally disbanded, some of them were unquestionably still children. Joonmyun didn’t even know how to open a bank account, though he had at least five, each managed by a different employee of his father’s company. He had a wife and a baby on the way. The first time Jin watched an EXO video he messaged Yixing to say, “yo no offense but y’all look the same.” Twelve was the number of identical eggs in a carton. Someone like Jin could never take them as a collective seriously, couldn’t even begin to comprehend the things that kept them up at night, and he was justified in his indifference. But that was the world from which Yixing hailed and for years all that he knew. 

Point being, it couldn’t have been anybody. He could narrow it down to two, but knew that realistically only one of them would’ve said no. 

“You alive in there?” he hears Lu Han yell from outside.

 

*

 

“Wallet, check. Phone, check. Pocketknife, check.” Lu Han, leaning into the mirror, corrects a piece of wayward bang. “I think I’m good.”

“ID? And hold on, pocketknife?”

“You never know who you’ll encounter on the street. ID’s in the wallet. How do I smell?”

Like some expensive French cologne. “Normal,” Yixing says neutrally. “Let’s go.”

They’re in the middle of putting on their shoes when a loud crack of thunder sounds from above. Lu Han squints up at the kitchen window. “Is that … ice?”

“Fuck,” Yixing says, remembering the morning’s weather report. “Hail tonight.”

Lu Han gives him a look. “C’mon man. I thought we agreed that I was responsible for looks and you were responsible for controlling the weather.”

“I’m _Storm_???”

Lu Han’s hair is flat by the time they arrive at the club. It’s Jin’s friend’s birthday. “Poppin’ bottles all night,” Jin says, sticking out a hand. “Jin.”

“Lu Han,” says Lu Han. “We got caught in the rain. Sorry my hand’s wet.”

Jin coughs into his fist. He slaps Yixing on the back, already stinking of tequila. “I like this one. C’mon, let’s get you guys messed up.”

Three hours later, the birthday boy is puking in the restroom. Lu Han goes in to help, but Yixing is hopelessly dizzy himself. He watches Lu Han’s back retreat into the shadows and wonders how many times he’s seen this before. It all feels too familiar. He lies back on one of the sofas and stares at lasers flashing across the ceiling.

“You lightweight son of a bitch.” Beside him is Jin, drowsy and loose-limbed. 

“Why aren’t you watching after your friend?”

“He’s got Lu Han now.” Jin leans forward. “So—“

“Don’t say it.” He doesn’t know what Jin is going to say, but his gut is telling him he doesn’t want to hear it. 

“Don’t say what?”

“It’s not what you think,” Yixing says.

Jin crosses his arms behind his head and sinks back into the sofa. “Tell me how it is.”

From the dance floor below Yixing spots a head of brown hair making its way through the crowd of bodies. He can hardly keep his eyes open, but they find Lu Han immediately. Bleary, then locked in— _target_. Lu Han looks around aimlessly until he locates Yixing in the balcony above and makes an okay sign. It’s the perfect selca angle, and from here Lu Han is at his handsomest. Broad shoulders, the regal slope where his neck meets shoulders. Chin tilted up, the cut of his jaw. Everything feels chaotic, magnified when you’re drunk. The person Yixing would’ve once taken the hand of and introduced as, _my best friend_ , deadpan, so that people would’ve suspected it to be a joke, so they couldn’t be entirely sure it was. Once he walked in on Lu Han looking at naked fanart of them together—2D Yixing was taller, darker, and pinning him against a bedpost. “The fuck am I so small,” Lu Han complained. “Why do you always top?” “Always?” Yixing said, because it wasn’t like he sought this kind of thing out. He was disgusted. His entire body recoiled. That was his dick, rubbing against Lu Han’s dick. Both slick with come. He looked away, smacking Lu Han on the head. “Stop checking me out,” he said. He was pretty sure Lu Han was bigger in real life; he knew what Lu Han’s orgasm face looked like, the stupid sounds he made when Maria Takagi fondled herself onscreen.

A cab appears in front of them like magic. One drunk passenger stumbles out, and the three of them pile in. Jin gives vague directions to his apartment. Lu Han talks the most when he’s sobering up, leaning forward and his knee hitting the back of Yixing’s seat every time they stop at a red light. His northern accent is thick and warbled. Jin’s asking him about Europe, about the food, the music, and Yixing quietly passes out. When he wakes up, it’s to Lu Han’s muffled yawning. 

“I’m not ready to meet anyone right now,” he’s explaining to Jin. “I just came home, like, yesterday. I don’t even know what I’ve missed.”

 

*

 

The entire world is up before they are the next day. “I hear Lu ge’s in town,” writes Joonmyun. “Tell him I said hi.”

 _Lu Han and Zhang Yixing’s Wild Night Out_ , the tabloids are calling it. _Little Chinese Prince Rises from the Dead (Or Europe). EXO Bandmates Reunited, Celebrate in Typical Western Style. Lu Han, Lu Gay?_ A low-res shot of Lu Han slapping Jin’s ass, probably during his six-minute twerking demonstration.

Yixing shuts off his laptop. “So apparently nothing happened yesterday besides you.”

“Us.” Lu Han shrugs. “That last one isn’t even legit. It could’ve been anyone’s ass, c’mon. It could’ve been a _girl_ ’s ass.”

“That was definitely Jin’s ass,” Yixing says.

“I mean,” Lu Han says. “It’s nice.”

Yixing waits, but Lu Han doesn’t continue. “Let’s stay in today.”

Lu Han says, “Sure,” and puts on his sunglasses. He looks like a douchebag, but the truth is they both haven’t experienced hangovers like this since they were twenty and drinking was still a sort-of novelty. Right now walking to the fridge hurts. Looking at the computer screen hurts. Blinking hurts. An hour into the day, they’re back in bed.

“This is so much better,” Lu Han says, crawling into Yixing’s sheets instead of his own guest bed next door. Yixing aches too much to move away. His whole body is relaxed like this, with Lu Han lined up against his back, Lu Han’s chin pressing into his neck. A moment later Lu Han’s snoring through his mouth, and Yixing wriggles his head into the comforter long enough to fall asleep.

 

Late afternoon Yixing’s pillow begins vibrating. He finds his phone under his head. A message from Kris reads, _yeah… i know_

He scrolls up. There is a whole string of texts he doesn’t remember sending. To Kris, 1:48 a.m.: 

_the prodgal son I;;sbck._

Kris’ reply is immediate. _u drunk man? u need me to pick u up hold back ur hair_  
 __  
i mean lhan  
lhahn  
lahuan  
Lu Han  


_o  
hows he been_

Yixing turns onto his side to face Lu Han, who is very still, with one arm angled over his forehead. He doesn’t even look like he’s breathing. He just looks like a man. Sleeping. 

_im isssd him_

 

*

 

It might’ve been Shanghai, or maybe Nanjing. He and Jongin were especially keyed up that night, about to perform a remix of “Two Moons” that involved Zitao doing a backflip over their crouched bodies right before the end. Yixing rolled back his shoulders one at a time and couldn’t crack his knuckles enough. A hand pressed down at the nape of his neck moments before they were set to go out, and Lu Han’s voice said, “Hey, if Huang Zitao crushes you tonight I’m setting my MCM bag on fire.”

Yixing didn’t turn around, so Lu Han couldn’t see his first smile of the night. “I still want to be buried in mine.”

“Nope. Setting yours on fire too. The twins can’t survive without each other.”

His smile grew bigger. “So if Taozi hypothetically crushes me, you’ll hypothetically ask him to crush you, too?”

Lu Han flicked the back of his head. “I was talking about our backpacks. I still have a long life ahead of me, alright.”

No one died. The heel of Zitao’s boot just barely grazed the top of Yixing’s head, but they pulled it off. Backstage he swept Lu Han up into a breathless, sweaty hug. It was as extravagant a gesture as gestures went, if he didn’t know it at the time. They spun and spun until Lu Han slammed into a wall, and when he laughed Yixing felt it like a string vibration shaking his own lungs. “Geez, Yixing, can you at least wait until we get back to the hotel?” Yixing cleared his throat. Yes, people were watching, but mostly just the coordis, and half of them were on their phones.

Lu Han was red-faced when he pushed Yixing away. “Geez,” he said again, grinning. His brow shone with what might have been Yixing’s sweat. It should’ve been disgusting, but instead it made Yixing pull him into a second hug. He closed his eyes and realized he would never be able to hug Lu Han again without reliving this moment: the mingle of sweat and hairspray, the heat of Lu Han’s cheek against his own, the way their skinny bodies moved to accommodate the other. 

“I feel really great,” Yixing remembered saying, in a lame whisper, and Lu Han probably patted his hair, maybe kissed it, agreed, “Good” or “Me too.”

Afterwards he watched Lu Han climb up the back of the stage in his white costume. Jongdae was on the other side in black, a top hat slanted over his eyes. Lu Han flashed everyone behind him a thumbs up and made direct eye contact with Yixing before he turned towards the lights. His shoulders had broadened over the last year into the breadth of a normal guy’s shoulders. Even in the dim light Yixing could make out the newly defined cords of muscle under his white t-shirt and he had the insane thought of smoothing his own hands over them, feeling them clench and quiver. 

“You okay?” He remembered Zitao nudging him in the side. “You’re sweating like a pig.”

 

*

 

An old wives’ tale is that the best cure for a hangover is more alcohol. 

They settle for a couple of beers from Yixing’s fridge. Yixing texts a quick apology to Jin for ignoring his thirty last frantic texts all along the lines of _sorry man i hope i didn’t kill your career_. Jin has no idea how publicity works. He thinks that if Yixing shows up to the supermarket in pajamas no girl in China will ever want to sleep with him again. The reality is a special feature in the “They’re Just Like Us” section of your favorite tabloid. _Zhang Yixing picks watermelons by knocking on them first, just like us!_ above a shot of him smiling placidly at the striped green melon cradled in his arms. They even photoshopped a fuzzy night cap onto his head.

Lu Han has remote privileges and he decides on a Korean movie Chanyeol features in for about thirty seconds. He’s holding an ice pack to his forehead as they watch Chanyeol dressed up as an amusement park mascot in the scene where the main character goes on a date with her longtime crush and ends up puking on the roller coaster. He holds out a balloon and says, “For the lovely lady?” before some kids sock him in the nuts. Lu Han snorts beer up his windpipe, dropping the icepack. Yixing curls up into a ball, resting his head on the dip of Lu Han’s side, bobbing up with every one of his insidious giggles. 

“Hey,” Yixing hears himself say. It’s been a few hours, and his senses are already dull again, slower than usual. “I have a question I’ve been meaning to ask.”

His mouth is moving faster than his brain. Lu Han pats him on the head. His hand stops just below of Yixing’s collar, smoothing down the back of his shirt.

“Do you,” Yixing begins slowly, trying to regain feeling in his tongue. Suddenly his lips are all heavy, like they don’t belong to him. “You and Kris.”

Lu Han’s entire body language changes. He turns to face Yixing, sits up straighter, opens his mouth. A knot forms between his eyebrows. 

“What?”

Yixing doesn’t have time to think before the words come out. 

“Did you guys ever fuck?”

“Are you kidding me right now?” Lu Han says.

It’s like his mouth is made of cotton. “You don’t have to tell me. It’s—I understand.”

“Nothing ever happened between me and Kris.”

“But it could’ve?”

Lu Han is massaging his forehead. “What prompted this?”

Yixing wonders the same thing. He wonders, why are they always drinking? And he shouldn’t even be that drunk. But he is. But he is. This is how it’s always been with Lu Han. In the past. They would drink, and Yixing would get drunk. And Lu Han would go along with it, like Yixing didn’t know. But Yixing knew. He wasn’t _stupid_. 

Maybe a little stupid. 

“It just doesn’t make sense,” Yixing says. “Why you guys stopped talking the way you did.”

Lu Han has on his thinking face, his panicked what-do-I-do-what-should-I-say face. This is him, pulling the emergency lever. Yixing just wants him to know it’s alright, that he’ll never judge Lu Han like Lu Han secretly believes and is afraid he will.

“Yixing,” Lu Han begins quietly. “Many years ago, I kissed him.

“We were both, like right now. Fucked up. I was – I guess, lonely, at the time. He was confused. We were both confused, and young. He kissed me back. I thought for him it’d be a phase. We weren’t, you know we were never that close. Not like you and me, or you and him. But I think… he had some stuff going on. One night he was like, ‘let’s just run away. I’m committed to this.’ And I told him, very seriously, ‘I’m not.’”

“Fuck,” Yixing says, because suddenly everything hurts and he wishes he hadn’t asked.

“I meant it, though. I wasn’t committed, wasn’t ever going to commit to him. I thought he got that. But everything was weird afterwards. We still got along in front of everyone, but we never messed around after that, and then he left. You were there.”

Yixing nods, remembering it all. The slammed door that reverberated through the entire apartment. But what he doesn’t understand is something else. What he’s afraid to ask is—

“Why wasn’t it us?”

The question that has churned over and over in his mind for the last year. Why wasn’t it him? The question that, when pushed down, bobbed up still at the most inopportune moments, like while he was in the middle of a Skype call with his mom and she asked, “How’s Lu Han, that dear?” _Why wasn’t it me?_ Why wasn’t it _them_? He didn’t care, he told himself. He wasn’t jealous. Jealous was for weak, helpless people. Yixing didn’t get jealous—of Jongin’s control, of Kris’ height, of Lu Han’s beauty. He pushed it down again. And then Lu Han stupidly showed up on his doorstep like—straight out of every used up romcom in the world, except they’re both men. The world doesn’t work like that. _Yixing_ doesn’t.

It’s a really, really ill-timed question. Lu Han keeps staring at him, a different kind of staring. Yixing can’t read this one, he’s never seen it before. It’s all new to him, like a birthmark Lu Han’s hidden from him all these years.

“What do you mean, why wasn’t it us?” 

Yixing closes his eyes. He envisions an ocean and himself at the bottom of it, the fish swimming above him. Underwater you can’t hear yourself talk. The water effectively separates you from yourself.

“Why didn’t you come to me when you were lonely? Why Wu Yifan? Why not me?” 

There’s a long silence, and then some shifting on the couch. A moment later, he feels Lu Han’s breath on his cheek, Lu Han’s hands holding his knees together. He keeps his eyes closed.

“Zhang Yixing,” Lu Han whispers. “I want you to think very seriously about what you just said and, if you’re positive that’s what you meant, then ask me again.”

Yixing opens his eyes. Luhan hovers before him, like a fearless star. “Why not me?” he repeats, and in an instant Lu Han’s hands are on him, touching his face, his neck. “Whoa,” Yixing says, and before he can say it again Lu Han is kissing him.

For a moment he lets him. Every touch is heated, marked with an urgency he didn’t expect. Lu Han has been wanting to do this, maybe for a long time. But Yixing keeps his lips slack, neither encouraging nor resistant. It feels like standing at the edge of a bridge looking down. Once, for a special variety segment, he climbed the Bay Bridge, chained to the person in front of him with a harness. Straight ahead he could see the rising steel peak, hear the roar of traffic below. This is not the same. His line of vision is muddled. With discomfort, with arousal. Lu Han gently pries his lips apart and Yixing is letting him. He wants to disappear into himself.

Instead he cups the side of Lu Han’s jaw and kisses him back. Lu Han groans softly into his mouth. It makes him want to laugh, but instead he ruts uncertainly into Lu Han’s thigh. He’s not supposed to feel like this, like the only parts of him that matter are the ones touching Lu Han right now. 

“Since when?” Lu Han breathes against Yixing’s neck. It’s unbearably light, and Yixing jerks away from the small hot puff of air. _Tell me_ , Lu Han’s saying, with his hand over the outline of Yixing’s erection straining inside his jeans. Yixing can’t help the hitch of his hips up toward Lu Han’s touch, and when they make eye contact, Lu Han says,

“I can’t believe this is happening. This is _sick_.”

It’s sick how good it feels, and how right. Lu Han’s hand is nothing like his own, clammy and tugging on his dick. Drunk, Yixing can be an impatient lover. He’ll guide a girl’s fist up and down, teach her what he likes, but the truth is—painfully—he likes this. He likes Lu Han like this, nervous, testing the cold waters. Warming up. They’ve always known each other too well, been too close, with only this undetectable kernel of tension between them. The kernel that hardened with Lu Han’s disappearance, shrank and came back as looming and inescapable as a cancerous tumor. The sickness they shared between them, the unspeakable sickness of being attracted to your best friend, a man. Someone with parts you’d recognize in a mirror as similar to your own. Someone you’ve showered with and whose stony, shining body you’d never dared allow your eyes to linger on, because that was a delicate tree branch you were hanging on to. Yixing has held back for so long. He wants—he can’t take it anymore.

“Since now,” Yixing says honestly. “Probably.”

 

*

 

They were heavy. They were the 0:55 drop, the buildup to something flammable. You didn’t know where it’d take you.

Yixing grabs Lu Han’s hand before he steps out into the road. “Watch out,” he says. “Car.” 

“I wasn’t planning on going,” Lu Han says, but lets Yixing hold his hand.


End file.
